Notes and Errata of Mark of the Asphodel

 Spent some of the morning working on my fe_exchange  story, but then I got sidetracked and ended up working on this instead.  It's an "interlude" in the Michalis/Melissa soap opera, one that cuts away from the action in Macedon to spend a few moments with Caeda and Marth.  Who, after all, are a part of the Grand Plan that Michalis is hatching, whether they know it or not.

There is maybe a little more going on beneath the surface in this chapter than in the preceding ones, but not really enough to warrant a full liner-notes fiesta.  Maybe after the second interlude chapter.  You can basically assume that anything weird and creepy in this one is intentional on my part.

 So, according to this guy on Serenes Forest, if you go to Fire Emblem World and enter data on the MyUnit creation page, you can get this wallpaper of Catria.  I dunno why MyUnit creation = sexy Catria pix and I maybe don't want to know the logic behind it, but it's already on MY desktop.  Shoot, this is the first official full-body art of Cat since the card game stopped, isn't it?

Now, for 'fic.  samuraiter , this one is for you.  I'll remove the dedication if you don't like the shout-out, but your line of thinking definitely inspired this one.

Anyway, while I've been utterly stalled out on continuing any "serious" stories for Archanea thanks to FE12 and its overall wtf-ery, a little while ago I did embark on an appropriately wtf 'fic project, the first installations of which can be found here and here.  I figured that, since I objected to a lot of the frothiness of FE12 (especially since most of the bleak character endings are totally unchanged), I would try to appease the 'fic demons with something appropriately frothy.  Soapy.  Soap-opera-y.  

And this turns out to be the portentously titled "Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal," in which Lena has visions, Melissa pops back out of obscurity, and Michalis decides to take advantage of some dangling plot threads by tying them up to his satisfaction.  It's crack and it's weird, but it's kind of fun to write.  I've never explored Lena before, so writing her is different for me; she has a great and complex backstory but I've never had the compulsion to deal with her much until now.  Melissa is... Melissa, and Michalis is a scheming, self-centered, but not completely heartless bastard, and Caeda turns up in Chapter Four in full-on politician mode.  No, Chapter Four isn't out yet.  I dunno when it will be as I appear to have closed without saving at some point and lost big chunks of the text.  :/

( Notes and Spoilers for Prologue ) 

( Notes and Spoilers for Chapter 1 )

This is actually a prequel to one of my other 'fics.  See if you can figure out which one (it'll be clear by Chapter Eight... whenever that comes out).  

 Here we go with Part Two.  This and Part One were originally conceived as a one-shot, separate from the main body of "No Saint to Follow."  Some of the stylistic differences will probably show once Part Four comes up.

This one is a little darker, more violent, with some occurrences of "language."  Oh well.  Also, it's a rougher draft than usual... I think once I'm happy with it, I'll put three or four segments on ffnet.

( Steel and Thunder )
No complaints regarding King Jiol, please.  The man had it coming.

And yes, Melissa is a bit of a head case.  Note the lapse into third-person speech.  I'll try to keep that to a minimum, but it's right there in canon.

ETA: Title comes from a lyric in "Bold Marauder" by Richard and Mimi Farina.  I like the John Kaye cover version, personally.

It seems to me that all canon-warping pairings are not created equal.  For some bizarro reason, I find that pairing a characters with someone outside of their canonical "destiny" feels more transgressive when the pairing isn't crack.  Taking an indisputably "het" character and putting them in a yaoi or yuri pairing, or pairing two characters Because I Feel Like It (see: "By Any Other Name") is something I'm comfortable enough with.  Taking a "het" character and having them shack up with a totally plausible het choice with some canonical justification feels... dirty?  Feels like I should expect to get mauled for publishing it?  It's like it falls down some sort of fan-fictional Uncanny Valley and from there goes right to the Creepy Zone.

And no, I'm not carping about Catria/Marth again, though I have this problem with that particular pairing.  There's another FE3 hookup I'm working with that has, IMO, even more justification than C/M, and on some level I feel like fanboys and girls ought to beat me with sticks if I ever publish it.  Which is stupid, because every single day fan-writers publish stories featuring pairings that warp, shred, and blast canon.  That's part of what fanfiction is about, man.  I see the potential for this pairing in the text, I'm exploring it, and I shouldn't have to justify it to anyone.

Anyone else have this problem?  Anyone else find they're comfortable with something that is gleefully, unabashedly non-canon/crack, but not comfortable with something plausible enough to be almost-canon?